Decemberists Renew Vows With ‘Crane Wife’

The tenth anniversary of the release of The Decemberists’ breakthrough 2006 album The Crane Wife will be marked with a limited deluxe box set edition by Capitol Records/UMe on 9 December.Five years after their first independent release, the Portland, Oregon five-piece marked their major label album with The Crane Wife, their fourth full-length overall.It was promptly described by Stereogum as a “masterpiece” and by The Guardian as “bold and wondrous.” It was the group’s first UK Top 40 album and went on to win a place in countless year-end, best-of lists including those in Rolling Stone, SPIN, Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly.

The new edition of the album will comprise five LPs, with the original album as a double-LP and three additional discs featuring a wide selection of B-sides, bonus tracks, unreleased outtakes, alternate versions and songwriter Colin Meloy’s solo acoustic demos.

The fourth and fifth discs offer demos of nearly every song on the album, including the three-part ‘The Crane Wife’, presented as one composition in its original sequence.The set will also contain a Blu-ray disc of a two-hour concert filmed live for the second-ever webcast by NPR (National Public Radio) in 2006 at the 9:30 Club in NPR’s Washington, DC, base, never before commercially available.

The discs are augmented by a 20-page booklet with liner notes by Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke and an essay by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the lyricist, writer and performer behind the Tony and Pulitzer-prize winning play Hamilton, who is a longtime fan. Additionally, an extremely limited version of the set of only 500 copies, pressed on marbled red vinyl and signed by the band, is available for pre-order exclusively at Decemberists.com.